[pulseaudio-tickets] [Bug 50977] New: Using applications with sudo is more cumbersome than necessary.

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50977

             Bug #: 50977
           Summary: Using applications with sudo is more cumbersome than
                    necessary.
    Classification: Unclassified
           Product: PulseAudio
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: clients
        AssignedTo: pulseaudio-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: tanuk at iki.fi
         QAContact: pulseaudio-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
                CC: lennart at poettering.net


Depending on system configuration, sudo will by default keep HOME unchanged or
will change it to the target user's home directory. In case HOME is kept
unchanged, running applications with sudo fails, because HOME is not owned by
the current user. However, if the target user is root, like it usually is, HOME
will still be readable, so there's probably no good reason to fail just because
HOME is not owned by root. So, instead of checking whether HOME is owned by the
current user, libpulse should fail only if reading the necessary files fails.

If this is fixed simply by dropping the ownership test, then there will be the
problem that if ~/.config/pulse et al don't exist, then root will create them,
causing access problems when running as non-root. It's not necessary for
libpulse to create anything, that's just how things are currently implemented.
So, changing things so that libpulse never creates anything is another thing
that needs to be implemented in order to properly fix this bug.

Currently it's necessary to set PULSE_SERVER to point to the normal user's
native protocol socket in order to run programs with sudo. That extra step
could be avoided with these changes (when sudo doesn't touch HOME, that is. If
sudo changes HOME, then making things "just work" is much more tricky).

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